Worth Reading: Hacking through subaudible commands

Chinese researchers have discovered a terrifying vulnerability in voice assistants from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and Huawei. It affects every iPhone and Macbook running Siri, any Galaxy phone, any PC running Windows 10, and even Amazon’s Alexa assistant. Using a technique called the DolphinAttack, a team from Zhejiang University translated typical vocal commands into ultrasonic frequencies that are too high for the human ear to hear, but perfectly decipherable by the microphones and software powering our always-on voice assistants. This relatively simple translation process lets them take control of gadgets with just a few words uttered in frequencies none of us can hear. —Mark Wilson @ CO.DESIGN

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Worth Reading: Docbook

Computers were first invented to do math, and they do it really well. But it didn’t take long for users to repurpose their futuristic calculators into fancy, dynamic typewriters. Now human-readable text drives computing, so it’s important to choose the right format for the text you write. DocBook is an XML schema. XML is an extensible markup language a lot like HTML. It’s truly ubiquitous, but you may know it by RSS or Atom, the Open Document formats of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice, Inkscape and the SVG file format, and much more. In fact, it’s safe to say that if you own a computer or mobile device, there’s XML on it. —Seth Kenlon @ Opensource

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Reaction: Networks are not cars or cell phones

The network engineering world has long emphasized the longevity of the hardware we buy; I have sat through many vendor presentations where the salesman says “this feature set makes our product future proof! You can buy with confidence knowing this product will not need to be replaced for another ten years…” Over at the Networking Nerd, Tom has an article posted supporting this view of networking equipment, entitled Network Longevity: Think Car, not iPhone.

It seems, to me, that these concepts of longevity have the entire situation precisely backwards. These ideas of “car length longevity” and “future proof hardware” are looking at the network from the perspective of an appliance, rather than from the perspective as a set of services. Let me put this in a little bit of context by considering two specific examples.

In terms of cars, I have owned four in the last 31 years. I owned a Jeep Wrangler for 13 years, a second Jeep Wrangler for 8 years, and a third Jeep Wrangler for 9 years. I have recently switched to a Jeep Cherokee, which I’ve just about reached my first year driving.

What if I bought network equipment like I buy cars? What sort Continue reading

Worth Reading: WeChat spying revelations

It has long been known that due to WeChat keeping its servers inside China, the lack of legal protection of privacy data, and the control over companies by police, that WeChat data is not safe, and can, without protection, be accessed by police or other state actors more or less at will. This has naturally made people shy away from using WeChat for any more serious or political discussions. More and more court cases of people being prosecuted simply based on private chat messages to friends have further illustration this. At the same time, at the time of the Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong, it was shown that a ‘Trojan’ virus was being employed to surveil users remotely. —Safeguard Defenders @ China Change

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Worth Reading: Hyperconvergence and silos

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) promises benefits in several dimensions: streamlining deployments across compute, storage and networking; scaling linearly as needs grow; and unifying and simplifying management. When examining prospective HCI solutions, it’s important to ensure this set of promises is fulfilled, but more importantly that checking those boxes with HCI doesn’t create new IT silos. A careful examination of what causes these silos makes it much easier to identify a solution that blends seamlessly into your architecture and chips away at IT silos, while at the same time ushering in the simplicity and ease that HCI promises. —Kaustubh Das @ The Data Center Journal

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History of Networking: BGP Churn with Daniel Walton

On this edition of the History of Networking at the Network Collective, we discuss the history of BGP churn and Add Paths with Daniel Walton of Cumulus Networks. The original post on the Network Collective can be seen here.

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Worth Reading: Why Net Neutrality can’t be implemented

Suppose for a moment that you are the victim of a wicked ISP that engages in disallowed “throttling” under a “neutral” regime for Internet access. You like to access streaming media from a particular “over the top” service provider. By coincidence, the performance of your favoured application drops at the same time your ISP launches a rival content service of its own. You then complain to the regulator, who investigates. She finds that your ISP did indeed change their traffic management settings right at the point that the “throttling” began. A swathe of routes, including the one to your preferred “over the top” application, have been given a different packet scheduling and routing treatment. It seems like an open-and-shut case of “throttling” resulting in a disallowed “neutrality violation”. Or is it? —Martin Geddes @ CircleID

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Worth Reading: Signposts on the roadmap to 10TB/sec

The world of Ethernet switching and routing used to be more predictable than just about any other part of the datacenter, but for the past decade the old adage – ten times the bandwidth for three times the cost – has not held. While 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was launched in 2010 and saw a fair amount of uptake amongst telecom suppliers for their backbones, the hyperscalers decided, quite correctly, that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was too expensive and opted for 40 Gb/sec instead. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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What Kind of Design?

In this short video I work through two kinds of design, or two different ways of designing a network. Which kind of designer are you? Do you see one as better than the other? Which would you prefer to do, are you right now?

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Worth Reading: Why you should have a CAA DNS record

This Friday, all certificate authorities will have to honor a Domain Name System (DNS) record that allows HTTPS website owners to restrict who can issue SSL certificates for their domain names. It’s a long-needed defense against the issuance of fraudulent certificates, a security risk that domain owners had few protections for until now. The Problem: There are tens of certificate authorities (CAs) trusted in browsers and operating systems and any one of them can theoretically issue a valid SSL certificate for any website on the internet. Furthermore, many of these certificate authorities have subordinate CAs and resellers that are operated by separate organizations and which can also issue SSL certificates to end users. —Lucian Constantin @ The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Work life balance

Miserable at work? You’re not alone. More than half of U.S. employees were not engaged at work between 2010 and 2012 according to Gallup’s recent State of the American Workplace report, which collected data from more than 195,000 employees. Many of those who were not engaged wanted a reason to be, such as the company showing them how to perform their best. —Alessandra Malito @ MarketWatch

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Fish Fountain

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Worth Reading: Hunting AdwindRAT

An increasing number of malware families employ SSL/TLS encryption in order to evade detection by Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). In this blog post I’m gonna have a look at Adwind, which is a cross-platform Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that has been using SSL to conceal it’s traffic for several years. AdwindRAT typically connects SSL sessions to seemingly random TCP ports on the C2 servers. Hence, a heuristic that could potentially be used to hunt for Adwind RAT malware is to look for SSL traffic going to TCP ports that normally don’t use SSL. However, relying on ONLY that heuristic would generate way too many false positives. —Erik Hjelmvik @ Netrecsec

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Worth Reading: How blockchain really works

A distributed database that is used to maintain a continuously growing list of records, called blocks. That sounds nice, but how does it work? To illustrate a blockchain, we will use an open source command-line interface called Blockchain CLI. If you haven’t already, install Node.js. —Sean Han @ Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Planning for cloud’s limitations

Protecting data from losses requires a well-planned data-management strategy. Many strategic plans include using cloud services, but IT and other departments must understand the cloud’s strengths and limitations when it comes to protection. The benefits of the cloud include inexpensive storage costs, instant scale, high availability and the elimination of on-premises hardware infrastructure. Used properly, the cloud is essential for many firms that simply couldn’t offer their service through any other platform. Despite these advantages, the cloud has limitations, and firms should build their plans around their understanding of these limitations. —David Zimmerman @ the Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: Retrieval and relevance

Our expectations for search have gotten higher and higher since Google has gotten better and better. These days, very few people search beyond the first page. If those search results aren’t good enough, they’ll either try again or they’ll quit. As Search Engine Watch reports, “Page 1 results garnered 92 percent of all traffic from the average search, with traffic dropping off by 95 percent for Page 2.” —Faizan Ahmed @ Free Code Camp

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Reaction: Networking Vendors are Only Good for the Free Lunch

I ran into an article over at the Register this week which painted the entire networking industry, from vendors to standards bodies, with a rather broad brush. While there are true bits and pieces in the piece, some balance seems to be in order. The article recaps a presentation by Peyton Koran at Electronic Arts (I suspect the Register spiced things up a little for effect); the line of argument seems to run something like this—

• Vendors are only paying attention to larger customers, and/or a large group of customers asking for the same thing; if you are not in either group, then you get no service from any vendor
• Vendors further bake secret sauce into their hardware, making it impossible to get what you want from your network without buying from them
• Standards bodies are too slow, and hence useless
• People are working around this, and getting to the inter-operable networks they really want, by moving to the cloud
• There is another way: just treat your networking gear like servers, and write your own protocols—after all you probably already have programmers on staff who know how to do this

Let’s think about these a little more deeply.

Vendors only Continue reading

Worth Reading: Global content removals

From the Internet’s earliest days, the tension between a global communication network and local geography-based laws has been obvious. One scenario is that every jurisdiction’s local laws apply to the Internet globally, meaning that the country (or sub-national regulator) with the most restrictive law for any content category sets the global standard for that content. If this scenario comes to pass, the Internet will only contain content that is legal in every jurisdiction in the world — a small fraction of the content we as Americans might enjoy, because many countries restrict content that is clearly legal in the U.S. —Eric Goldman @ CircleID

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Worth Reading: Common issue detection for CPU profiling

Profiling of services is a useful method to find optimizations to improve service performance; the ODP (“On-Demand Profiling”) framework has helped identify many performance problems at LinkedIn. However, as these analyses and subsequent optimizations are done for individual services, common performance problems (patterns) are often rediscovered. This results in wasted effort for teams and doesn’t help with the global uptake of important fixes. —John Nicol, Chen Li, Peinan Chen, Tao Feng, and Hari Ramachandran @ LinkedIn

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On the ‘web: The Future of Data Center Fabrics

Recorded live at IETF 99, this Priority Queue episode is a roundtable conversation on new and emerging ideas for data center fabrics. Greg Ferro is joined by Jeff Tantsura, a chair of the routing working group at IETF; Russ White, a network architect at LinkedIn; and Tony Przygienda, who works for a vendor and claims to be the only grownup in this conversation. (You be the judge!)

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